Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

"Jack Boudreaux, at your service."

Vivian stared at him for a second longer, obviously debating the wisdom of snubbing him. Jack would have laughed if it hadn't been for Laurel. He knew exactly what was going through Vivian Chandler Leighton's mind. He didn't quite fit into any of the neat little pigeonholes she usually assigned people to. He was notorious, disreputable; he wrote gruesome pulp fiction for a living; and he had a past as shady as the backwaters of the Atchafalaya. Women like Vivian would ordinarily have written him off as trash, but he was stinking rich. The Junior League didn't have an official category for riffraff with money.

"Mr. Boudreaux," she said at last, nodding to him but not offering her hand. The smile was the one she had been trained to give Yankees and liberal democrats. "I've heard so much about you."

He grinned his wicked grin. "None of it good, I'm sure."

Ross Leighton chose that moment to make his appearance. He stepped out of his study down the hall, a glass of scotch in his hand, looking dapper and distinguished in a tan linen suit. He was of medium height and sturdy frame, with a ruddy face and a full head of steel gray hair he wore swept back in a style that suggested vanity.

"We have company, Vivian?" he asked, ambling down the hall, lord of the manor, usurper to the throne of Jefferson Chandler. He wore a big smile that tended to fool too many people. It didn't fool Laurel. It never had. It widened as he recognized her, and he came toward her, chuckling. " Laurel! My God, look at you! You look like a drowned mouse."

He bent to kiss her cheek, and she stepped away from him, sliding her glasses back on and tilting her chin up to a truculent angle.

Jack watched the exchange with interest. There had been no words of greeting or concern from any of them, and if looks could have killed, Ross Leighton would have been dead on the floor. Charming family.

"We had us a li'l car trouble," Jack said, drawing Leighton's attention away from Laurel. "You got a tractor I could borrow? If we don't get that car out'a where it is quick, the swamp she's gonna swallow it right up tonight."

"It's a poor night to be out on a tractor," Ross said, chuckling, bubbling over with condescending bonhomie.

Jack slicked a hand over his damp hair, then clamped it on Ross Leighton's shoulder, flashing a grin as phony as the older man's laugh. "Ah, well, me, I don' mind gettin' a li'l wet," he said, thickening his accent to the consistency of gumbo. "It's not like I'm wearin' no five-hun'erd-dollar suit, no?"

Ross cast a pained look at the handprint on the shoulder of his jacket as he led the way back down the hall to his study so he could call the plantation manager and order him to go out in the rain with Jack.

Laurel watched them go, wishing she could have been anywhere but here. She wasn't ready to deal with Vivian yet. She would have liked another day, maybe two, just to settle herself and gather her strength. She would at least have liked to look presentable instead of like a drowned mouse. Damn Ross Leighton-with that one offhand remark he had managed to make her feel like a ten-year-old all over again.

"Laurel, what on earth are you doing out with that man?" Vivian asked, her voice hushed and shocked. She pressed a bejeweled hand to her throat as if to make certain Jack hadn't somehow managed to steal the diamond-and-emerald pendant from around her neck.

Laurel sighed and shook her head. "It's nice to see you, too, Mama," she said with the faintest hint of sarcasm. "Don't worry about our well-being. Jack hit his head, but other than that we're fine."

"I can see that you're fine," Vivian snapped.

She turned and went back into the parlor, expecting Laurel to follow, which she did, reluctantly. Vivian lowered herself gracefully onto one of a pair of elegant wing chairs done in cream moiré silk. Laurel ignored the implied dictate to occupy the other. That was a trap. She was wet and presumably dirty. She knew better than to touch the furniture while she was in such an appalling state of dishabille. She stationed herself on the other side of the gold Queen Anne settee, instead, and waited for the show to begin.

"You've been in town for days without so much as calling your mother!" Vivian declared. "How do you think that makes me feel?" She sniffed delicately and shook her head, pretending to blink away tears of hurt. "Why, just this morning, Deanna Corbin Hunt was asking me how you were doing, and what could I say to her? You remember Deanna, don't you? My dear good friend from school? The one who would have written you a letter of recommendation to Chi-O if you hadn't broken my heart and decided not to pledge?"

"Yes, Mama," Laurel said dutifully and with resignation. "I remember Mrs. Hunt."

"I can only imagine what they all think," Vivian went on, eyes downcast, one hand fussing with a loose thread on the arm of the chair. "My daughter home for the first time in how long, and she isn't staying in my home, hasn't even bothered to call me."

Laurel refrained from pointing out that telephones worked two ways. Vivian was determined to play the tragically ignored mother. She had never been one to see ironies, at any rate. "I'm sorry, Mama."

"You should be," Vivian murmured, casting big blue eyes full of hurt up at her daughter. "I've been feeling just ragged with worry, not knowing what to think. I swear, it'd like to have given me one of my spells."

Guilt nipped at Laurel 's conscience at the same time the cynic in her called her a sucker. She'd spent her entire childhood tiptoeing around the danger of causing one of her mother's "spells" of depression, and her feelings had engaged in a constant tug-of-war between pity and resentment. On the one hand, she felt Vivian couldn't help being the way she was; on the other, she felt her mother used her supposed fragility to control and manipulate. Even now, Laurel couldn't reconcile the polarized feelings inside her.

"How do you think it looks to my friends to have my daughter staying in town with her lesbian aunt, instead of with me?"

"You don't know that Aunt Caroline is a lesbian," Laurel snapped. "And what difference would it make if she were?" she asked, pacing away from the settee, away from her mother, and toward the mahogany sideboard, where half a dozen decanters stood on a silver tray. She wished fleetingly that her stomach could have handled a drink, because her nerves sure as hell could have used one about now. But she turned away from it and went to the French doors to look out at the rain and the gathering gloom of night.

"It's nobody's business who Aunt Caroline sees," she said. "Besides, I don't hear you complaining about the fact that your other daughter lives with Caroline."

Vivian's perfectly painted mouth pressed into a tight line. "I quit concerning myself with Savannah 's actions long ago."

"Yes, you certainly did," Laurel mumbled bitterly.

"What was that?"

She bit her lip and checked her temper. No purpose would be served by pursuing this line of conversation now. Vivian was the queen of denial. She would never accept blame for her daughters' not turning out the way she had planned.

She pulled in a calming breath and turned away from the window, her arms folded tightly against herself, despite the fact that her clothes were soaking wet. "I said, what's so wrong with Jack Boudreaux?"

Vivian gave her a truly scandalized look. "What isn't wrong with him? For heaven's sake, Laurel! The man barely speaks the same language we do. I have it on good authority that he comes from trash, and that's no great surprise to me now that I've met him."

"If he were wearing a linen suit, would he be respectable then?"

"If he were wearing any less of a shirt, I would ask him to leave the house," she stated unequivocally. "I don't care how famous he may be. He writes trash, and he is trash. Blood will tell, after all."